Among the Plains Indians, one method for a warrior to gain status outside of a full-scaled battle was to conduct a horse-stealing raid against the enemy. These forays also provided training and experience for younger warriors. While the braves wore mostly traditional attire, by the late 19th-century that included Hudsons Bay blanket coats for winter sorties like those worn by this raiding party. In addition to warmth, these also provided a sort of camouflage in patchy snow-covered terrain. This was one of Russells earliest oil paintings, as well as one of the first to be published abroad, featured as an...

Born in New York City, Robert Bruce Crane (1857-1937) embraced two artistic movement of the late 19th century the Barbizon school and tonalism. Crane studied in Paris in the late 1870s and on his return to America, began painting landscapes "en plein air" in the Barbizon style which emphasized landscapes expressing the emotional experience of the artist. After joining the Old Lyme colony of painters in Connecticut in 1904, he began to turn to tonalism, using beige, russet and brown tones to achieve an autumnal effect in his paintings as he does here in "Early Morning".

The career of George Inness (1825-1894) is a lesson in American art history. Beginning as a Hudson River School-style painter, he later became a proponent of first the American Barbizon school and then Tonalism, always adapting each movement into his own unique version. Strongly influenced by the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, he used his depictions of nature to express his own spiritual concepts. The increasing abstraction of his later works, like "The Edge of the Hill", have led some to call him a precursor of Modernism.